


The Sun Hasn't Died

by lady_ragnell



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Community: trope_bingo, F/F, Femslash, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 10:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have to figure out how to survive somehow, after the world ends. Elena does it by stealing horses and roaming, at least until she finds the village of Camelot and its residents, especially its librarian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sun Hasn't Died

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : past character death, mentions of violence and rioting and other consequences of the apocalypse
> 
> Written for the free space on my Trope Bingo card and because **Emjayelle** prompted an Elena/Mithian apocalypse AU on tumblr. I restrained myself from putting novels worth of backstory and minor character interaction into this.
> 
> Title from "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons.

Elena steals horses, after the world ends.

She starts off on Sidhe because cars are asking for trouble and there’s no way to get petrol anyway, these days. She’s near enough to the stable when it all happens that she can walk the distance, hide away for a few days while the radio broadcasts get less and less frequent, and pack her saddlebags full of whatever she can find before taking Sidhe and riding. She doesn’t even know where she’s going. Just away from the graveyard her family home has become.

People aren’t the only ones affected by the end of the world, though, and it’s hardly a day before Elena comes across a pasture with a pair of working horses and no one anywhere near to take care of them. She raids the farmhouse for anything resembling food and weapons and doesn’t follow the smell of rot to the bedroom. She rigs saddlebags out of whatever she can find, and when she rides off again on Sidhe, she’s got two other horses in her train, more than glad to follow her.

Elena knows how to live off the wild well enough, and she survives skirting around the woods, where there’s enough grass to feed the horses and enough edible plants and game to feed her. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when winter comes, but she has months to survive until then, and she has some hope that she’ll find some sign of civilization left, some people who didn’t tear themselves apart.

She’s just decided on naming the farm horses, a wagon team if she’s a judge, Holmes and Watson when she finds the next horses, a little herd of three who must have jumped their fence when it lost electricity. They all fall into her little train without Elena having to coax them, and she’s glad to have them—proper riding horses, so she starts switching off between them and Sidhe, because Sidhe’s the best friend she’s got after the apocalypse and she isn’t going to overwork her.

Sometimes, Elena sees the signs of people having been around recently, and a few times she sees small groups of them, watching her with wariness and the sort of hunger that’s more greed than starvation. It’s a little depressing that every prediction of the apocalypse where humanity takes to looting and banditry seems to be at least partly true, but none of them bother Elena, probably a little thrown off by her herd of horses, which seems to increase every few days.

Elena’s on her own, only her herd to chatter to, for almost two full months, roaming the countryside and even the edges of the cities when she dares (she knows there are people there, maybe even people coming together to start to rebuild some sort of life, but she’s skittish of them, as much as her horses are of strangers). By the end of it, there are seventeen horses in her train (including two that are technically ponies, one miniature horse who refused to be left by her racehorse companion, and a mule), and Elena feels a bit like a wild woman, riding about in worn-out jeans, ill-fitting motorcycle chaps, and her father’s old barn jacket, her hair all in tangles because she can’t bear to cut it.

“I am Khaleesi of the Dothraki,” she says loudly one night, after a few days of silence, and Sidhe, who always sticks close like she doesn’t trust the new horses, snorts like she knows how silly Elena feels.

She ends up naming the miniature horse Khaleesi for her light mane and the fact that all the larger horses dote on her, and if there’s nobody around to appreciate her cleverness, well. Elena always did better on her own, anyway.

*

Somewhere around the two-month mark, Elena finds herself riding near where the Welsh border used to be when she sees a man walking along one of the paved highways, grass already peeking up through cracks like nature’s just been waiting to get its own back. He stops walking and gapes openly when he sees Elena riding at the head of her herd, on the Friesian she named Shadowfax even though he’s not white.

He looks ridiculously heroic in the late-afternoon sun, all shiny blond hair and what looks like a patched-up suit jacket and a tool belt that seems to have been repurposed to hold his guns and knives. He looks like the action hero from some post-apocalyptic thriller, and Elena can’t help laughing a little, if only because there’s so little to laugh at these days. She rides a little closer, when nobody jumps out of the countryside to ambush her while she’s distracted. She hasn’t run across a lone traveler before, at least not one brazen enough to be walking on the roads without worrying about bandits.

“Where are you off to?” she shouts once she’s close enough, pulling Shadowfax up and letting the rest of the herd collect around her, Khaleesi and the two ponies predictably coming in last.

“Home,” he says, obviously wary, but he closes some of the distance between them anyway, seeming fascinated by her, or by the horses, or maybe the combination of both. “You?”

“Away from it. There isn’t anyone there.” Nobody really pities each other, at the end of the world. Everyone’s lost someone, or a lot of people. The stranger still looks a little sorry, and it’s just novel enough to make her smile. “Are you traveling alone?”

“For now.”

There’s plenty of grass around for the horses. Elena swings down from Shadowfax’s back, giving him a pat when he noses at her. “I’ve got some food. I’ll trade you that for a bit of company, I haven’t had a conversation with another human being for ages.”

He looks her up and down, wary, and she makes a conspicuous point of not touching anything that might be a weapon. After a second, his hand falls away from his hip and he gives her a nod. “Sure, it’s been a while since I had a proper meal. I’m Arthur.”

“Elena.”

He starts the fire, scavenging for wood and providing a lighter instead of making her use one of her precious matches or lighters. He lights a cigarette from it too, and sits there smoking it while Elena busies herself cooking beans out of a can and some leftover rabbit from one she snared a few days back. “I don’t even smoke,” he says after a few minutes. “I just picked up a box of—someone’s favorites, the last convenience store I ran across. Smoking seems like the thing to do at the end of the world, so I thought I would do it.”

“Nasty habit,” Elena comments.

“Yes, I always told her that.” His mouth twists and she wonders if they’re talking about a dead woman or if he just doesn’t know. Communications were the first things to go. “I was in France when it happened, on a business trip in Paris. I’ve been trying to get home ever since. If anywhere survived, home did.” His mouth turns down. “Not everyone I care about was there, but some people will be.”

“Where’s home?”

“A few days’ walk into Wales. For you?”

“Close to Scotland. I’ve been riding a while.” As if to prove it, Sidhe noses at her shoulder, Khaleesi following after because she seems to think she’s Elena’s lapdog these days and is far too interested in human food. “How the hell did you get across from France?”

“A madman with a boat who wanted to get to his family as well. I was lucky to catch him. I gave him a map to Camelot, in case he wants to find me. He said he might come, if he couldn’t find them. You aren’t looking for anyone?”

Elena shrugs and serves him up a dish of their meal. “There isn’t anyone to look for, not really. Uni friends, maybe. My best friend from college. I know what happened to everyone else. We were hit pretty hard.”

“You could come with me.” Arthur looks as though he regrets the words as soon as he says them, but he forges on nonetheless. Elena feels a little fond of him, all of a sudden, and wonders if he was a stiff-necked sort before the apocalypse came, all proper and mannerly. She thinks he might have been, if he were the sort to have business trips in Paris. “It would be faster, and you would be under no obligation to stay. It might give you somewhere to go, though. For at least a little while.” He smiles across the fire at Holmes and the quarter horse she’s been calling Mr. Darcy. “There are stables.”

“Well, now you’ve convinced me. I can’t really leave them, or don’t want to. I started with one, but they all came along with me, so they’re mine as far as I’m concerned.”

“Khaleesi of the Dothraki?” he asks, and Elena dissolves into giggles, laughing properly for the first time in months, and Arthur watches across the fire, bemused and fighting back a smile of his own.

*

Arthur rides well enough that he obviously has quite a bit of experience, and now that Elena has a goal in mind, a place to go for however little time, they tear across Wales and towards the coast quickly. Arthur gets fond of a few of the horses, just as she has her favorites, and opens up to her while they travel. He doesn’t talk much about where they’re going, mostly just his life before, when he did consulting in London, and Elena responds in kind.

It’s the evening of the following day before Arthur starts slowing. For a minute, Elena thinks he’s just ready to stop traveling for the night, but then he points over the next rise. “We’re almost there.”

Elena understands the undertone of panic that he probably doesn’t mean to get across. “It’s isolated enough that they could be doing well,” she allows. She’s got no idea where they are in map terms, other than the smell of the ocean on the air, and it’s been a while since they saw a sign for any town larger than a scattering of abandoned houses.

His mouth sets. “We’ll see.”

When they come over the hill, the horses moving at a walk now, maybe sensing Arthur and Elena’s reluctance, the first thing Elena notices is the castle overlooking the village, some sort of small fortress from times gone by that is pretty well kept up. The second thing she notices is the warm glow of electric light from a few of the buildings in the village.

Arthur makes a noise like he’s been punched in the gut and gallops towards the light, Elena following in his wake with the herd, taking one of her guns out of its holster in case the people they’re going towards aren’t as friendly as Arthur thinks they’ll be.

She needn’t have worried. By the time Elena rides into the village, more people than she’s seen in months are already pouring out into the streets, something like a hundred of them, and Arthur is standing in the middle of it, overwhelmed and spinning and expression happier and more frantic with each person he meets eyes with. They all stop when Elena, the herd at her heels, comes into view, except for Arthur himself, still looking for someone, or any number of people.

“I brought Arthur,” she says into the silence, and breaks the moment, just in time for a dark-haired woman to fling herself out of the crowd and into Arthur’s arms. She laughs, and the crowd starts milling again, without purpose except the line of people who want to say hello to Arthur and another woman with brown hair who gives Elena a small smile and absently reaches out for one of the horses.

“You’re welcome,” says the woman. “Doubly so, for bringing Arthur.” Arthur’s moved on to hugging someone else, but the first woman still has a proprietary hand on his sleeve—Elena doesn’t think they’re lovers, or there would be a lot more kissing. “I’m Mithian, I’m the librarian in town here. Are all these horses yours?”

“Oh.” Elena tears her eyes away from Arthur, drowning in a tangle of must-be-familiar limbs, and dashes at her face. She’s gone this long after the end of the world without crying, and she won’t do it now just because Arthur is happy and reunited with his loved ones and she isn’t. “I suppose. One of them was, and then they followed me. I’m good with animals. Elena.”

“Good to meet you, Elena. We’ll sort out somewhere for you to sleep, if you’re planning on staying.”

“For a few days, at least, but there are the horses to worry about. I’ve got a tent, I’ll set it up just outside town.” She tightens her fingers around the reins and watches Arthur a little longer, not looking around anymore, with his face buried in the first woman’s shoulder. “I should do it now, really, before it gets too dark. Let Arthur know I’m okay, if he asks, would you?”

“If I can pry him out of Morgana’s grasp,” Mithian says, and Elena supposes Morgana is the one Arthur can’t seem to let go of.

Elena nods, not used to politeness after months on her own, and prods Sidhe into turning around and walking back out of the town, herd following in her wake, even Shakespeare, the horse who carried Arthur into town.

*

When Elena wakes in the morning and looks out of her tent to find a few children hovering at the edge of the herd, she startles so badly it spooks a few of the horses nearest her until she puts out her hands to calm them down. She’s in Camelot, she remembers, with Arthur and the people who seem to know him and the kind librarian who looks as though she’s been through the wars.

Arthur’s there with the children, as well as the woman Mithian called Morgana, and he gives her a nod and a smile when he sees her awake, looking years younger. “You should have stayed last night,” he calls across the space between them, and she shoulders her way between the horses to him, smoothing her hands across noses and withers as she goes. “There’s a stable at the other edge of town, and a house attached. We can lodge you there.” The brief tightness on his face tells her more than she wants to know about what happened to the previous occupants of the house. “This is my sister, Morgana.”

“Sister,” she says, and gives Morgana her best smile. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s the end of the world, don’t make small talk,” says Morgana, and Elena immediately likes her more. “I came out to welcome you to town, and Arthur thought it would be better with him here as well. We’re glad to have you, and the horses, as long as you all do your fair share of labor. Plenty of us in town learned how to ride, and the horses will make the scouting for supplies easier.”

“Of course. I don’t know how long I’ll stay, but for a while, at least, I can.”

Morgana’s mouth quirks, and for the first time Elena can see how she and Arthur might be siblings. “Do they follow you everywhere, or can you walk through the streets of the town without an entourage?”

Elena shrugs. “I haven’t tried leaving them for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s a nice pasture and Arthur and I drove them hard to get here, so they may stay just to eat. If they wander after me I’ll come back.”

“Good, then. Come into town, we’ll introduce you to everyone.”

“Everyone” turns out to be whoever they run across in the streets of the village—a man named Elyan who introduces himself as the town’s blacksmith and his sister Gwen, who looks grim when she isn’t smiling at Arthur like she can’t believe he’s there and says she’s their expert in textiles and one of the medics, farmers and cooks and others Elena can’t keep straight, most of whom greet Arthur with tearful smiles and Elena with wariness.

“We ought to look in on Emrys, I don’t believe you know him, he turned up after the disaster,” says Morgana, and doesn’t seem to notice the way Arthur starts violently and looks as though his heart is suddenly in his throat. “He’s the reason we have any electricity at all, he’s a genius.” She veers down a side street and up to a house with a few teenagers lounging about outside it, hooked up to what Elena could swear are iPods. They wave at Morgana and stare at Arthur and Elena, and Morgana flaps a hand at them before knocking on the door to the house.

It gets flung open a few seconds later by a skinny dark-haired man about Arthur’s age, a few years older than Elena, one who stops and stares at Arthur when he sees him while Arthur makes a strangled noise and an aborted step forward. “Merlin,” Arthur spits out when none of them make a move and one of the teenagers pops one of her earbuds out to figure out what’s going on.

“Oh my God,” says Merlin-possibly-Emrys, and then they’re hugging tight enough Elena worries a bit about their ribs and Elena has to swallow resentment again because it seems like Arthur gets everyone and she’s got nobody at all.

“Apparently you’ve met,” Morgana says, dry as dust, and Elena thinks she might possibly be in love with her, or would be if she were less terrifying.

Arthur gives Merlin a few hearty backslaps in the manner of a man who realizes he’s hugged his mate for a bit too long, but Merlin continues looking shaky and teary and like all his dreams have come true at once. “Merlin worked in my office,” says Arthur. “I have no idea why he’s here. Merlin, why are you here?”

“I made it out of London, and I had no idea where to go, and I remembered you talking about Camelot, and how you thought it could survive anything. So I came. I didn’t … you were in France, how are you here?”

Morgana clears her throat. “I’ll leave the two of you to catch up, shall I? Elena, I hope you don’t mind if your tour ends with me alone.”

“Not at all,” says Elena, even though she’s feeling more bereft than ever, thinking about her dad, and Grunhilda, and Vivian even if they did fall out of contact after A-levels, and everyone else who isn’t here and won’t ever be here.

Arthur and Merlin are still standing in Merlin’s doorway with the teenagers watching in interest and bemusement when Morgana leads Elena away. The rest of Morgana’s tour is perfunctory at best, though she lingers on the stables and the little cottage (starting to fall apart) that will be Elena’s home if she stays. “I’ve got business to take care of, I’m afraid,” she says when she catches sight of Gwen in the distance again, giving her a wave. “What if I leave you at the library? It’s where everyone goes, it’s our information center most of the time.”

“Sounds fine,” says Elena. All she wants is to go back to her herd, but the part of her that’s starved for human contact can’t bear the thought of having to go back to only having them for company.

The library, it turns out, is a big house at the center of town stacked high with books on every subject, organized by some system but not one Elena recognizes from any of her years at school. There aren’t serial numbers or a desk or anything else Elena expects out of a library, and the easiest ones to access are books about practical skills, like farming and mending and spinning. They’re all well-thumbed and a little ripped up.

Mithian appears less than a minute after Morgana ushers her in and starts on a little speech about how Mithian is the person to talk to if Elena has questions rather than problems to solve, or if she wants to learn anything new, since they’re still working on getting a school restarted. “I’ve got to run, Mithian,” says Morgana when she appears. “May I leave Elena with you?”

It doesn’t sound like a question, and from Mithian’s tight smile it isn’t acknowledged as one. “If you like. And if she likes. The library is open to the public, after all.”

Morgana nods and sweeps out with one last “Welcome to Camelot” tossed out in Elena’s direction.

Elena stands in the doorway and breathes in the smell of books, musty and comforting. Mithian lets her, and doesn’t try to prod her into anything like Morgana spent the morning doing. “It’s overwhelming,” Mithian says when Elena looks at her. “I was in Cardiff when it happened. I worked there, even though I grew up in the next village from here, and afterwards it took me ages to get home, hiding from the original riots. I was on my own for what felt like forever, and suddenly there was Morgana, and Gwen, and all my Camelot friends. They told me not to bother continuing on to Nemeth.”

“I’m sorry.” Condolences after the apocalypse are stupid, but Elena can’t help herself. “My family too. I might have wandered forever if it weren’t for Arthur.”

“Your herd would have grown too much for you to handle.” Mithian smiles, gentle and, Elena thinks, real. “You can’t imagine how you looked last night, riding into town with your hair all wild and so many horses behind you. Wasn’t there a Celtic goddess of horses who they worshipped in Rome, even? You looked like her.”

“Do you tell everyone who comes into town that they look like gods?”

“As far as I’m concerned, anyone who survives out there deserves that, but no. Not really.” Mithian gestures around. “You can take whatever books you like. It’s polite to return them, but if there’s a book on horses that you’d get a lot of use out of nobody will object too much, as long as you don’t mind the curious turning up on your doorstep.”

“Thanks. I’ll look around some other time, though, I really ought to get back to the horses, try and get them moved into the stable before nightfall.”

Mithian nods, and she doesn’t touch Elena, but Elena feels bolstered when she leaves nonetheless, a little less lonely when Mithian is so obviously lonely as well.

The children are still with the herd when Elena gets there, all of them shy of each other. Elena packs her tent back up and enlists the kids’ help to lead the horses through the village streets and to the stable, which all of them go into with every appearance of excitement. She spends the rest of the day giving them all a good curry and checking their hooves for rocks and shoes wearing out.

Arthur comes before nightfall, when she’s pitching her tent in the last empty stall, not ready to tackle the house yet. “Sorry for abandoning you,” he says. He at least has the grace to sound sheepish about it.

“You weren’t expecting to see your friend.”

He still sounds a little wondering when he says “No, I wasn’t,” but then he shakes it off to look apologetic and so stupidly noble, and if it weren’t the end of the world, if she were still a veterinary student and he were still a consultant and they happened to meet up, she thinks it might be very easy to like him, even love him. As it is, she wants to scream at him for getting everything she wants. “I feel bad, though. I hope you’re settling in okay?”

“I’m fine. I am.”

“Aren’t we all?” She shrugs and looks away to unpack another bag of musty blankets she stole out of someone’s summer cottage when she stayed there a night. “I’m sorry that it wasn’t some friend of yours instead, by some freak of chance,” he says after a minute. “I’m glad to have Merlin here, so glad—he was my best mate in London, for all he was just some bloke from the IT department—but I wish there was someone here for you too. Aside from the horses.”

Elena wasn’t exactly a social butterfly before the end of the world. Head in the clouds, clumsy, more interested in animals than people, just plain odd. She didn’t have many people, and she feels the loss of each of them all the worse for it. “Maybe someday there will be,” she says. “Someday, communication will go back up, things will stabilize. Humanity is tenacious. And maybe someone survived. I’ve got to believe that.”

“And in the meantime, you’ve got us. Morgana likes you, I like you, Mithian asked after you … we may not be who you want, but you have got us.”

She tries out a smile. “That’s something, anyway.”

*

It doesn’t take long to figure out how Camelot works.

Morgana has the only proper radio set-up in the village, so Morgana is the one in charge. Everyone but Arthur seems a little wary of her, but Elena’s not sure why that is, as she’s businesslike and intimidating but no worse than anybody else after the apocalypse. There are the people who seem to resent Morgana and the people who seem to be grateful she’s there, and the people who can’t decide which side they fall on—Mithian, Gwen, and Arthur’s Merlin seem to lead that faction.

People come to Morgana with problems, and she delegates them to whoever she thinks is best suited to them, and they all muddle along. Arthur, within three days, is doing much the same thing, leaving Morgana to contacting the outside world while he deals with the day-to-day, and it has the air of a pattern between them, Morgana looking outward while Arthur looks in. Merlin is one of the more popular people in town, probably because he lets anyone who wants come into his house to charge their iPods and laptops and whatever other devices survived the power going out.

Elena is absorbed sooner than she expects into the day-to-day, especially after she happens to mention she was working on her veterinary degree to Gwen. Aside from lending out horses to scouts who can ride, she finds herself assisting with sick sheep and goats, trying to retrain a sheepdog that wandered into town and only seems to take commands in Welsh, and a hundred other things she isn’t qualified for. In return, she makes a few friends—the farmers, mostly, and Gwen’s brother Elyan, who as it turns out is also a farrier and helps her with the hooves and shoes for the herd.

She’s only been there two days when she has to go back to the library for the first time, hoping there’s a book on sheep anatomy somewhere that will help her out. Mithian greets her with a smile from where she’s sitting on a rickety chair reading T.H. White. “Epona,” she says before Elena can get her query out, and that brings Elena up short. “The horse goddess I mentioned the other day, I looked her up after you left. She was Gaulish, not British, but I suppose one can’t be picky with one’s goddesses.”

“Arthur and I thought more Danaerys Targaryen,” Elena says, because she hasn’t got any better answer. “I was wondering what you have on sheep.”

“Quite a lot, as it happens. There have been sheep here for time immemorial.” Mithian turns around to the shelves, but pauses in looking around to speak. “I never read _Game of Thrones_ , actually. Never had the time. And now I do have the time, but I can’t quite bring myself to read something that unhappy.”

Elena knows there’s something she should say to that, but she can’t think what it could possibly be. Instead, she just nods even though Mithian isn’t looking at her, and Mithian continues combing her shelves. A few minutes later, she has a stack of books to set down in front of Elena, and a few folders of what look like printouts of web pages, though Elena has no idea where she got those or why. “Thanks,” she says.

“You can take them out, or you can stay a while. Nobody bothers you much, when you’re here. The comfortable chairs are mostly upstairs, if you’d like.”

“Sure.” Elena scoops up an armload of the books and goes up the stairs when Mithian points at them. Upstairs is indeed filled with more comfortable furniture, as well as more haphazard stacks of books, and it isn’t until Elena notices the curtained off corner and the kitchen counters stacked high with cookbooks (at least twenty copies of _The Joy of Cooking_ among them, and she thinks she sees a few copies of a Gordon Ramsay book that her dad got her when she was first starting to learn to cook without setting anything on fire) that she realizes Mithian lives here.

She’s been invited, and she tries not to feel guilty for curling up on a lumpy old armchair that reminds her of one Grunhilda had in her office to read more about sheep than she ever thought possible. After a while, Mithian boils water on a little fire that she carefully keeps away from the books and gives Elena a cup of tea that tastes of strange herbs, not at all like the tea she’s used to, or used to be used to.

They don’t talk the whole afternoon, and Elena goes home with some idea of how to take care of the sick sheep and a few ideas for preventative measures for the rest of the town’s herd.

After that, she comes back to the library almost every day, when she gets the chance, and reads whatever she can find on caring for animals. Most of it is basic, common sense, and none of it will help her do the more advanced surgeries she hadn’t yet reached in her courses, but it puts her on steadier footing. Mithian is always there, cup of tea at the ready and a new book in her hand every day.

Elena can’t help noticing that very few people seem to come into the library for more than a few minutes at a time—mothers coming to get a few new easy books for their children, people with specific references, and visits from those who seem to be Mithian’s particular friends in town (Arthur’s Merlin, who usually comes with Arthur in tow and leaves Arthur to poke through books and talk to Elena while Mithian and Merlin say whatever needs saying, and Percival, the town’s carpenter, who’s working with Elyan to repair a wagon and some harnesses so her horses can start pulling their weight, so to speak), but it isn’t as busy as Elena might have expected. She can’t help wondering if it has something to do with the way Mithian almost never goes out except when that week’s scouts come back with everyone’s share of supplies, but she doesn’t know who to ask about that, or if she ought to ask at all.

“You don’t go out much,” she says finally, when two weeks of being there almost daily have passed.

“Neither do you,” Mithian points out, and rightly so. Elena might have friends, or at the very least acquaintances, but she’d still rather spend time with her horses than almost any of them. She’s less angry at Arthur, when he’s so obviously sorry to have his friends and family around him while she’s still on her own, but he’s busy with Merlin or Morgana three quarters of the time, and Elena hasn’t got the energy to be selfish with anyone these days. “It’s close-knit here, isn’t it? I’m still the girl from the next town over, and you’re from farther than that. Though you’re at least useful.”

“And you aren’t?” Elena gestures around. “We’ll need all this again someday. Even if they don’t think so yet.”

Mithian’s smile is a little more bitter than Elena expects it to be. “An optimist at heart, then. And I know we’ll need it, but they’re worried about survival.” She pauses. “We all are, in our own ways.”

There’s something there that makes Elena think of the wariness Mithian and everyone else seem to have for each other. Elena isn’t about to blame her, though. She’d do the same if anyone threatened to hurt the horses. “There’s plenty of time to find fuel for winter,” she says, and goes back to her reading.

*

One day, when Elena’s been in Camelot for over a month and is only just beginning to admit that she’s almost certainly not going anywhere for a while, there’s a commotion in the streets as Elena gets back from taking the herd for a gallop across the countryside (picking up wood to load them down on the way back, which is her justification for going out in the first place). She stables the horses before striding into the town proper, where Morgana is in the middle of shouting over the crowd.

“—and Merlin is working on getting more radios up and working so we can listen to more than one station at a time,” she’s saying when Elena manages to listen.

Elena catches Percival’s arm, since he’s nearest. “What’s happening?”

“Organized radio going up—a central station telling people to listen to various ones within regions, and the regional stations have collected names of people who are being looked for who came from each place, and there’s two-way radios set up for if any of those people want to check in.”

“Government?”

“Not the good old BBC,” says Elyan from behind her, clasping her shoulder, “but there’s some sort of structure growing out there, or various kinds of it, anyway.”

“—any of you have people you’re looking for, let me know, and where they’re from, and I’ll submit the names, I’ve been on the two-way with someone on the other side of Cardiff,” Morgana says. “There’s not much out of the cities yet, but some of the larger country towns are getting their feet under them.”

Elena can’t help thinking of all the people she _knows_ won’t be checking in, the names half-remembered of childhood friends that she’s tempted to put out there just so she knows there’s someone alive who remembers her the way she was, and her and her dad. The only person she might mention is Vivian, and Vivian was always a city girl. She could very well have been in London.

Morgana is still talking, and inviting Merlin up to stand next to her and tell them all about what the next steps are for technology, but Elena feels a little ill, the sharp pang of loss that she’s been swallowing back since the world ended rising like bile in her throat. She shoves her way backwards through the crowd just as quickly as she shoved forward and ducks down a side street to get her breath back.

It’s a little surprising when Arthur comes after her, but not as much as it should be. When she looks up at the noise of someone following her, he’s there with his hands out like he’s afraid she’ll lash out. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

He pauses, and looks like he’s debating something. “It’s easier not to know, isn’t it? I know I’ve got no right to complain, not to you, but there are people whose names I’m afraid to listen for. Friends from work, mostly, and my life in London. Merlin won’t talk about them, says he ran without looking for any of them.”

“I don’t even know what I’d do if I did hear about someone I know,” Elena says, slumping against the nearest building. “Because it’s not my dad, or my Aunt Grunhilda, or … most of the people I care about enough to go to them, I already know what happened to them. And they won’t be putting my name out there.”

“There’s no law saying you have to, if you don’t want to, or aren’t ready.”

“There’s no law saying anything anymore.”

Before Arthur can answer—and he’s frowning, because he’s some sort of idealist and undoubtedly believes that they ought to get some sort of judicial system in place as soon as may be—there’s the sound of someone else following their path. “Elena, I saw you—” Mithian starts, only to stop when she sees her standing with Arthur. “Sorry, I just wanted to make sure if you’re okay.”

Elena can’t help the warmth in her chest at that, at the thought of two people being worried enough about her to miss Morgana’s speech, or part of it anyway. “Getting there. Sorry, I was just overwhelmed.”

“Of course. I’ll just leave you two to your—”

“I should find Merlin, actually,” Arthur says with an odd look between them, a smile that comes with wide, surprised eyes. “Glad to know Elena’s in good hands, though. Is the library open later, Mith?”

The look she gives him makes Elena wonder if there’s more to it than just that. She isn’t stupid enough to wonder why Arthur seems pleased that Mithian sought her out, but the query about the library sits oddly in his mouth. “The library’s always open,” says Mithian, and smiles at the end of it. Arthur gives her a nod and Elena some sort of odd modified salute and wanders back the way they’d come, back towards the sound of the crowd’s excitement. “I’ll leave you be, if you like,” she adds when Elena takes a minute to look back at her.

“Or?”

“Or there’s always reading to be done.”

Elena could kiss her for not asking what’s got Elena upset when she has more reason than almost any of them to want contact with the outside world, because she isn’t quite sure herself. “I didn’t take care of the horses properly after our ride out. You could come give me a hand, though, if you wanted.”

Mithian’s smile at that is dazzling, and she’s the one who leads them to the stable. Elena apologizes to all of the horses by name while she checks them over and gives them a quick curry for the worst of what they picked up. Mithian follows along, handing her things when she asks for them, and giving each horse a gentle pet or two one they’ve sniffed her to vet her. Most of the people in town who know how to ride horses come by Elena’s fairly frequently, but Mithian never has, even though she obviously likes the horses nearly as much as Elena does.

She files that away in the list of little mysteries about Mithian, questions she may not ever ask because Mithian does her the favor of leaving her be and she figures the least she could do is return the favor.

*

A few weeks later, while Elena conspicuously avoids the radios Merlin is cobbling together out of spare parts and handing out to anyone who wants them, her name comes up for one of the week-long patrols. Since she’s come to Camelot, they usually take a few of her horses with them, and for ones where they’re sure the payload will be good they take Holmes and Watson and the wagon that’s now running beautifully.

This time, Elena only leaves Khaleesi, the two ponies, and two riding horses for emergencies, and the rest of the herd, wagon included, come with them. Elena happens to be out with Percival, a few men she doesn’t know well, and a girl named Freya who insists she turned eighteen last month and should be allowed to pull her full weight, one of the ones who hangs about Merlin to charge her electronics all the time.

Their party is too big to run across danger, and they go to one of the abandoned villages a few days’ ride away, a longer trip than most of the parties dare. The town is mostly untouched, and eerily empty—there’s a notice pinned to a rotting board on the edge of town saying that they all decided to take to their boats and one of the islands where raiders would be less likely to find them. God only knows if they got there, but they left behind stocked pantries and electronics that Merlin could cannibalize and use.

They load down the wagon with necessities, and all of them pack up saddlebags for each of the horses with whatever else they can find that might bring help to Camelot—there’s a tiny chemist’s shop that they raid for whatever isn’t expired or dangerous, and Freya finds a store of matches and lighters and candles in someone’s basement. Elena does her share of picking through useful things—tools, mostly—but when everyone starts sneaking off to look for things closer to their hearts (Freya comes back with a bag full of clothing to mend and use and another full of yarn and needles, Percival finds a film camera, film, and darkroom equipment, and one of the other men loads down with seed packets not just from vegetables but flowers as well), Elena goes looking for books. She fills three heavy saddlebags with them, mostly ones that could have some kind of practical use, but several that she gets only because she knows Mithian will like them. Mithian likes adventure and romance and happy endings, and Elena does her best to provide.

Percival smiles when he notices what she’s doing and tucks a few books into his own saddlebag.

The ride back to Camelot is slower than the ride out, the horses weighed down and needing more frequent rest, and they get back a half-day later than they meant to. Everyone greets them with obvious relief and helps to unload the horses, exclaiming over the haul they managed.

Mithian isn’t there, so Elena takes the bags of books and rides up to the library door. Mithian meets her on the doorstep with her brows knit. “I brought you presents,” she explains, dismounting and dragging the heavy bags up to the door. Mithian looks at what’s inside and closes her eyes briefly. “Is that okay?”

“It’s wonderful,” Mithian assures her, and falls to her knees right there to look through the books. Elena joins her, even though she knows what she got, and is surprised when Mithian lets out a soft, sad noise at the copy of _A Little Princess_ Elena picked up on a whim. “This was my favorite, when I was young. I watched the movie so much our tape wore out.”

“Well, then. Consider it yours instead of the library’s.”

Mithian clutches it. “I will.”

Elena doesn’t know what to do with Mithian’s obvious gratitude—she’d wanted to give a gift, but hadn’t thought far enough to think of how she would deal with giving it—so when Mithian keeps watching with her eyes wide and doesn’t look at the other books, Elena levers herself to her feet. “I should probably go back to where they’re unpacking, get my share. You should too.”

“Right.” Mithian stands too, leaving the books on the floor between them. “Thank you again. I’ll be there in a little while.”

“Good.” Elena blurts the next thing out before she even realizes she’s thinking it. “You should come for a ride someday. I know you like the horses. It’s good if they all get ridden, and I can’t rotate between them all and keep them in shape.”

Mithian smiles again, the book still clutched tight in her hands. “Thank you, Elena. I’ll … maybe I will.”

*

When Elena runs across Arthur and Merlin kissing in a field on her way to look after Mary’s sick cow, she trips over absolutely nothing and goes tumbling to her knees in the grass a few feet from them. Both of them, on their sides on a ratty old blanket, sit up, Arthur’s cheeks pink and Merlin with his eyes wide and his hand slipping out from under Arthur’s shirt. “I’m so sorry,” she blurts, struggling to her feet. “I’m on my way to see to Mary’s sick heifer. I didn’t see anyone, I won’t tell, you two just … go back to what you were doing.”

She flees before either of them can say anything beyond Arthur’s horrified choked noise, and spends longer than she technically needs figuring out why Mary’s cow is off her feed.

Merlin is waiting when she gets back to the stable, still feeling unaccountably rattled. He hops off the bale of straw he was sitting on while he played with Khaleesi. “Do you mind a chat?”

“You don’t owe me any explanations,” she says, and even means it. She has the horrifying feeling that nearly everyone in town thinks she’s in love with Arthur, since she’s the one who brought him, but the thought only crossed her mind once or twice, and then dimly. She only knew him for a few days before she saw his face when he saw Merlin, and she never would have thought she had a chance after that. “You really don’t. I’m not planning on telling anyone, if you don’t want it to come out.”

“We’re keeping it to ourselves for now. It’s new.” He pats Khaleesi’s head when she buts her head against him, not done being coddled. “It feels a little selfish, falling in love at the end of the world.”

“I’m not jealous, if this is your roundabout way of asking.” She is, but not of Arthur, so she figures it’s close enough to the truth. She’s jealous of having someone else there to grab for at night and fight the never-ending loneliness. Percival offered once, very quietly, and never treated her any different when she said no, startled because she’d always thought he was with Elyan. She thinks sometimes about going back to him, but it would just be for creature comfort and not anything more. They both deserve more than that. “I don’t think of Arthur that way.”

Merlin relaxes, and then seems to run out of things to say, probably because they’ve never been alone together before and she’s been avoiding him since the radios got up and running. “I’m glad. I’ve been worrying, a little. Arthur didn’t think you did, but.”

“But how could anyone not?” Elena asks, trying a smile on for size.

His grin makes him into a totally different person. “Exactly, yes. I was a little bit mad for him when we worked together in London, and we might have gone in that direction eventually, but then the world ended, and I thought he was dead, and when it turned out he wasn’t it sped things up a little.”

“The human population is going to triple within five years for exactly that reason,” she says. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you two have got things worked out.”

“It did take some working.” He goes back to looking around at the horses. “But it is worth it. If you get around to working things out with Mithian, I mean.”

Elena purses her lips and wants to say she’s got no idea what he’s talking about, but denial is one of the luxuries they’ve all had to give up. She doesn’t know if it is anything, really, but she knows how it must seem, and she knows what Mithian’s face looked like when she saw that copy of _A Little Princess_ and how she felt when she saw it. “Thanks,” she settles on finally, and she even means it.

“I wish I’d known all of you before—I mean, I did know Arthur, but the rest of you. I like you all now, but …”

Elena thinks about how different she was before the apocalypse, an optimistic student with a clumsy streak. She wonders if Merlin wore his wide smile more often, and Arthur relaxed with friends in front of the television, and if Morgana was always this sharp. She wonders what Mithian even did for a living, since somehow it’s never some up. She wonders if any of them would have been friends, if they’d met. She’s a few years younger than all of them, and that doesn’t matter now, but she thinks it would have then, and she’s almost glad that it’s one complication she doesn’t have to deal with. “If wishes were horses,” she says, foolishly.

“Then you’ve got more than anyone has a right to,” he finishes for her, and takes a few steps away. “I’ll leave you be, I just wanted to check in with you. I’ll try to talk Arthur out of being unbearable about things.”

“Cool. You should—I mean, it’s up to the two of you, but I think everyone would like to know that someone is happy. Nobody would begrudge you.”

He smiles. “Thanks, Elena. We’ll keep it in mind.”

With that, he walks off whistling, and Elena has to grab Khaleesi’s mane to keep her from going after him, because she’s a terrible flirt who will follow around anyone inclined to give her affection.

*

It could be a coincidence that Mithian shows up the next day in ratty jodhpurs and a thick jumper and asks if she might take Elena up on her offer of a ride. If it isn’t, well, Mithian doesn’t tell and Elena doesn’t ask, just saddles up Sidhe and Caldecott, one of her other favorite riding horses.

Mithian sits a horse like she was born on one, like Elena does, and they match pace easily as they ride out into the grassy countryside. A chill’s starting to come in the air, pinking up both of their cheeks, and it’s drizzling intermittently, but Elena is elated by the time they pause for breath. “You should have been riding with me all along, if you can ride like that.”

“It reminds me of my father, and I wasn’t quite ready for that,” says Mithian, and Elena winces but Mithian doesn’t seem really bothered by it. Away from Camelot, the difference in tension in her shoulders is visible. “He was a bit of a country squire, thought it important that I ride and pour tea and know how to greet kings and queens. Arthur and Morgana’s dad was worse, Arthur—” She stops, but Elena doesn’t ask about that part. “Anyway, I was riding almost before I could walk.”

“So was I. I showed a bit, when I was a teenager.” The drizzle picks up. “Were you a librarian in Cardiff?”

“No, though I wish I had been. I worked in an auction house. Can you think of anything more useless at the end of the world?”

There’s something tight in her jaw that Elena thinks might be left over from before the world ended, and she blurts out a tumble of words to try to ease it. “Plenty of things. You could have been a model. Or a music executive. Or an insurance agent, can you imagine trying to insure the apocalypse?”

That gets Mithian to laugh. “I suppose I can’t.” She looks up at the sky. “Being a native Welshwoman, I feel I should tell you that the rain is only going to get worse from here. We should ride back to shelter.”

“Race you,” says Elena, and directs Sidhe into a gallop before Mithian can say yes or no.

She beats Mithian back, but only by a few lengths, and they and the horses are both covered in mud, the horses tired but happy and Elena and Mithian giggling like a pair of schoolgirls, ignoring the looks they get as they head for the stable. Arthur, striding along with purpose towards Gwen and Elyan’s house, pauses long enough to give Elena a wink—or maybe it’s just a look, it’s hard to tell in the rain.

By the time they’re in the stable, some of Mithian’s stiffness has come back, making her shoulders straighter and her face paler and more serious. Elena hates it, and she’s dismounting and grabbing for Mithian’s hand before she quite realizes what she’s doing. “I won, so you get to help me rub the horses down after all that.”

“Okay.” Mithian doesn’t seem too reluctant to stay, and she keeps hold of Elena’s hand longer than Elena expects. They take care of the horses in silence, mostly, other than when they need to pass equipment back and forth. “I’m next on the roster for going out for supplies,” Mithian says at the end, when Elena hasn’t got another excuse to keep her there. “Would you mind if I took this one? I’ll take good care of him, I promise.”

“Of course. I trust you with him—with any of them. You have my full permission to take one out for a ride whenever you like.” Nobody else in the town can say that, and other than maybe Arthur, it’s unlikely anyone else will get it.

“Thank you, and I think I will, as long as I can convince you to come with me.”

It’s a weird feeling to blush, even though she was always awkward with people she’s attracted to. At least she has the comfort that they’re both a little pink with cold and wet anyway. “I won’t take much convincing,” she says. Playing coy isn’t going to do either of them much good.

Mithian leans her forehead against Elena’s temple for half a second, and then she’s stepping away. “I’ll see you soon, then.”

Elena should feel as though she’s left hanging, but instead she feels warm, like Mithian just made a promise instead of something that she would have interpreted as non-committal before she came to Camelot.

*

When Mithian comes back from her turn at patrol, there’s an extra horse in her train. She’s a beautiful dapple gray riding horse and, incredibly, she seems to be pregnant. Since most of Elena’s horses are gelded, it’s an unimaginable blessing, and when Mithian presents her with a smile Elena throws her arms around the horse’s neck only because Mithian is still riding about on Caldecott and she can’t reach her.

“I just found her roaming about,” Mithian says, and Elena looks up at her, teary and feeling ridiculous for it. “I’ve been calling her Eve, but it’s your right to rename her, if you’d like.”

“Eve is lovely. You’re lovely. God, thank you.”

“Well, you can never have too many horses.” Mithian finally swings down from Caldecott’s back, and Elena braces her automatically, bringing them close, and then all she can do is kiss her. They’re hidden between the horses, and Elena makes it quick, grabbing for Caldecott’s reins when she feels Mithian let go of them. When she pulls away, Mithian’s eyes are closed and her lips parted, and Elena busies herself letting Eve sniff her and giving her one of the precious apples they’ve started harvesting from the orchards around town—she’s been giving all her share to the horses. “Oh,” Mithian whispers, but there are things to do, and Elena has the worst timing in the world.

Or, well, the end of it.

The town is bustling around them, unpacking, and it’s easy enough to fall back into that. Nobody looks twice at them. Elena takes her share and makes sure Mithian gets hers, ducking in between all the people to grab a saddlebag of books that Mithian must have picked out for the library. She sees Morgana watching her at some point, and she looks like a woman, not just an icy queen; she nods when she catches Elena’s eyes and mouths a “congratulations” that even looks sincere.

“I think we have the mayor’s blessing,” she whispers the next time she gets close to Mithian, and enjoys the way she blinks and looks around until she finds Morgana, who is making a point of being engaged in conversation with Elyan over the boxes in the wagon that must have been filled up at an abandoned hardware store.

When Elena leads her horses back to the stable for a rubdown and to introduce Eve to the herd, Mithian follows like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Elena lets the silence last while they deal with the horses, all of whom are excited about the new arrival. They’re starting to run out of space in the stable, but Elena has seen some of the barns on the old sheep and cow farms a little way out of town, and she thinks that once she’s made it through the winter she might enlist Percival and Elyan to help her rebuild one for more comfort for the horses.

“Did you mean it?” Mithian asks when they’ve run out of tasks, turning to face her and squaring her shoulders. She’s tense in a way she usually isn’t with Elena, just around other people.

“Of course I did. It would have been cruel to do it, otherwise.”

“Okay.” And just like it’s as easy as that, Mithian relaxes again to step into Elena’s arms and kiss her. Elena responds after a second of surprise that there doesn’t have to be more talking—she’s not very experienced, especially not with women, but she didn’t think it would be as easy as an “okay” and a kiss, not after everything. Mithian’s lips are chapped from days of riding in the wind and rain, and Elena presses them closer together, arms going around her as Mithian tilts her head for a better angle.

They kiss there, in the middle of the stable floor, horses looking on, for who knows how long—long enough for Elena’s eagerness to back Mithian against the nearest wall, for her lips to feel tender and sore when she pulls away.

“You are the best thing about the world ending,” Mithian says, murmuring the words into her neck where she’s bending to press kisses.

Elena is so glad that Mithian is the one who knows what to do with words, that she has stacks and stacks of books that contain all the words she could possibly want to say, because all the response that she has to that is to draw Mithian’s mouth back up to hers.

*

Winter sets in colder than usual, or maybe Elena is just used to central heating when it gets this bad. She and Mithian spend days cuddled up under blankets, either at the library when Mithian insists on opening it despite its lack of fireplace or more often in Elena’s house, where they only get up when the horses need feeding.

Once, one of the men Elena knows less, a rabbity-looking middle-aged man who took down a stray deer with a thrown knife in the autumn, dares mention using the books for fire fuel over the winter. Mithian goes pale and gets her gun out, a warning shot going over his shoulder before anyone, let alone Elena, can stop her. “Think about what happens when people burn books,” Mithian snaps, and refuses to leave the library for days, as if afraid it’s going to be robbed. Elena looks at the way everyone looks at Mithian, even Morgana and Arthur, and thinks they’re not in any danger, not after that.

Nobody looks at all surprised when Mithian’s things move to Elena’s stable, and even less people are shocked when Arthur and Merlin finally, sheepishly, let on that they’ve been at it for months. As Elena predicted, people start coupling up at a truly alarming rate for winter, the body heat and the desperation meeting. Not all of it is long-term, judging by the amount of hopping in and out of one another’s beds the teenagers are doing, though their parents are just as bad. As far as Elena can see, Morgana is the only one who spends most of her nights alone, and even then it’s hard to be sure of it.

Before the snow sets in, a few men turn up in town, ragged and tired, strangers to everyone except Arthur—the shaggier one is the one who gave him the ride from France, and that alone makes him a hero to Morgana and Merlin, and the other one is a proper doctor, much to the relief of everyone with a first aid certification and some common sense who have been muddling through so far. Camelot, despite the winter that’s sure to test them to their limits, seems to be settling, carving out a space for itself.

Word on the radio is that their settlement is one of the most stable—not due to rioting or anything, that was all done with in the first month or so after everything, but simply because there’s a bad balance of practical skills. Morgana goes around looking smug and takes every bit of prestige it gets them. She’s the one who suggests to the central structure going up that there’s some sort of census, a more efficient way for people to find each other.

When the census goes around Camelot for everyone to sign, Elena thinks for the first time in ages of the family she lost and who might possibly have survived the apocalypse. Mithian, always quick to discern her moods, holds on to her elbow before she can start writing. “If you want a new start, this is the time. There will be those who give a false name. Nobody will ever know the difference.”

“It’s not as though I’m running from something. I just … what if no one’s looking for me? Or what if someone _is_?”

“Then we figure it out together.” Mithian takes the pen to write her own name, a flourishing signature with a last name Elena knows isn’t hers.

Elena doesn’t mention it, just takes the pen and writes out the name her parents gave her and sends the paper on to the next person.

The whole settlement packs into Morgana’s house to listen to her read it off when they’re scheduled to do it, the central settlement ready to take down the notes and others listening in to see if anyone recognizes names. They’ve got the honor to be the first ones to do it, since Morgana is the one who came up with the idea.

Arthur reads off each name, and Morgana sits at the two-way, waiting for it to start receiving words from across the island, everywhere in range (and Merlin boosted their power as well as he could).

When he’s finished, there’s a flood of words from all over, calling out names—Merlin’s mother, saying his name over and over while he cries and gasps and Arthur grips his shoulder, a friend of Percival and Arthur’s who got trapped in Italy for a while and has only just made it back to England, cousins and co-workers and school friends, something like a dozen, and then there’s a half familiar voice, shrieking like a harpy: “Elena! Elena O’Shea, are you there, how the fuck are you in _Wales_?”

Mithian’s the one who has to push Elena closer to the radio, and Elena drags her along with her, parting the crowd. “Vivian, oh my God, I didn’t think I would hear from anyone I knew.”

They babble at each other for a few minutes over the sound of everyone else doing the same, and finally Morgana calls a halt to it. “Set up times to talk to all your friends and family, everyone, it won’t work like this.”

Elena reserves the radio for five days from then in the afternoon, and makes sure Vivian has it in her head, only managing to get out of her that she’s somewhere outside of Brighton, of all places.

Mithian takes her home after, and lets Elena break down into ridiculous tears all over her shoulder, half relief and half grief for everyone that didn’t check in and won’t ever. She smiles the whole time and strokes Elena’s hair, not worried that Elena is leaving when Elena had dimly wondered if she might be—but then, Elena isn’t going anywhere, is she? Not even if Vivian asks, though she doesn’t think she will. Camelot is home, as much as anywhere can be now, and she’s got a life, and a barn to build in the spring, and days stretching out beyond that, to survive and thrive in.

“It’s a whole new world out there,” says Mithian, as if reading her thoughts, and Elena settles in to watch it come.


End file.
